Bound to Invade Iraq Again

This time almost everybody wants to intervene in Iraq. A few die-hard pacifists and some fierce isolationists may still be reluctant, but the rest of us are ready to give up our feeble principles and react on reality and “facts on the ground.”

There’s no doubt there will be an increasing intervention and those strikes from thin air are only the beginning. Soon American boots will be sucked onto Iraqi soil again. It’s not a political option anymore. The events are creating their own laws.

The American invasion of Iraq some eleven years ago was a rather political decision. It was not necessary, and it could have been otherwise. True it did follow a certain logic escalating from the previous decade, but there was no pressing reason to intervene at that moment. It was a relatively rare instance political madness. (Madness being defined as a lack of sense of reality.)

But the invasion of 2003 happened and created a new reality. The madness cannot be undone, for that would be insane, wouldn’t it?

Strangely, the laws of logic have changed. The decision to strike at Iraq in 2003 was lacking in logic, but it still created a new logic. Since the US intervened in the first place, the reasoning goes, it must intervene again. If there was a fraction of justification for the first intervention, it is infinitely more justified now.

For an observer this reasoning must be true. We know that the US must plunge into Iraq again because otherwise its engagement up to this point would be completely ridiculed. America invaded a country to fight terrorism where no terrorism existed, so obviously it must invade again now that a terrorist threat actually exists.

So it must be for political man cannot escape from his own actions and history makes its own demands. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to step out of all this and recognize that the chain of events has been flawed from the very beginning. What if we could look at the world afresh?

Our actions so far have only made bad worse, and American attempts at solving problems in the Middle East have only created more problems. What if we could look at the present with eyes that were not blurred by our past and do what the present demands without being bound by our faulty past behavior.